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Episode 1000

Depending on exactly how you count things (there are many unpublished episodes lurking around, and different parts of iBlog report different numbers), Saturday’s little story snippet was the 1000th episode on this blog. I’d seen the number coming, and entertained several ideas about how to celebrate it. Even more remarkable than my having written 1000 episodes is that there are people who have read them.

Tonight I took a random stagger through old episodes, ostensibly to find links broken when I upgraded my blogging software (there are a lot of them), and to fix a few formatting issues also caused by the conversion. My first impression: Muddled Ramblings is a good name for this blog. I can be incomprehensible when I don’t put my mind to it. It hurts the most when I turn cryptic right at the key moment of the episode, the big payoff sentence. This is the result, I suppose, of continuously publishing rough drafts, but Defective Yeti doesn’t seem to have the same problems I do. (In fairness to myself, I often attempt sentences with a high difficulty factor. You can’t play jazz if you don’t take chances. On the other hand, just because I’m taking chances doesn’t mean I’m playing jazz.)

Tonight I read some episodes I’d completely forgotten, and others I remembered with varying degrees of fondness and trepidation. I read the words ‘expecially’ and ‘whork’. One of those was intentional and satisfying, the other mortifying (and subsequently edited). Pronouns fly with reckless abandon, unburdened by the need to represent anything. My pronouns are free spirits, and don’t have time for oppressive grammatical shit. Free them! They don’t have time for things! Anything but things! They don’t care what they say.

Sometimes I was surprised to find two episodes next to each other. It’s impossible for me to picture the events discussed as having happened at pretty much the same time. In some cases they feel years apart in my memory. I’m not sure how that makes me feel about the last few years of my life being verifiable. I’m going to have to deal with future spouses, publishers, and other litigants with a better memory for my deeds than apparently I have.

One thought I had tonight was that should I become famous (hey, it’s possible), some poor intern at a publisher somewhere is going to have to read through all this crap, mining for nuggets that might be considered insightful or wise. By now, just over a thousand episodes in, that wretched soul is sitting with eyes crossed, pencil still poised over a blank page, knowing that if she doesn’t come up with something, she’s going to have to read the whole damn thing over again. To that person: Sorry, dude. Really. Remember when you were happy that you landed this sweet gig? Think of it this way, though. Now you can say, “Yeah, I’ve paid my dues. The check’s in the mail.” (I want to credit Snake Pliskin with that line, but it was some other guy.)

Roughly a quarter of the episodes are filed under Idle Chit-Chat. There hasn’t been much in the get-poor-quick category for a long time. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it is the company I keep. I don’t have anyone around to discuss sporting events based on cloning up wooly mammoths, or the correct way to construct a hotel on the moon. On the other hand, just about everybody here has a get-poor-quick scheme. I think that first rush of capitalism has given the locals the impression that all you need is a good idea and you’re on your way to fame and fortune. Everyone is a schemer here.

I’m mildly curious how many words this blog has in it by now. It’s a bunch. I did a count a while back, when the blog had maybe half this many episodes, and it came out to 170,000 words — a very fat fantasy novel or two mainstream novels. It’s likely I’ve more than doubled that count, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, for an oddly anticlimactic milestone, yippee.

* * *

OK, a bit of time has passed. I was pleasantly surprised to find that iBlog was scriptable, so with a bit of cursing at the worst programming language ever (AppleScript) I managed to write a little routine that counted the words in the bodies of all the episodes in this blog. While testing particular entries yielded slightly different results than I got from Jer’s Novel Writer for the same text (something worth digging into), it’s pretty safe to say that this blog has more than 450,000 words in the bodies of the episodes alone. That would make three quite fat novels, or five normal-sized ones.

OR you could follow Albuquerque’s weekly Alibi by using some other critter. The Alibi’s news page features the legend “Concordia cum Veritate” over a winged, crowned, monkey. (Are monkeys more honest that eagles?)